There's a lot of similar things looking around this year.

Yeah, yeah, there is.

There's some good stuff.

I saw a little clip.

Can I give a shout out? to a show called Life Support that Channel 5 are doing for a relatively small indie called Brinkworth Films and they showed it during the Channel 5 session and the clip was a chap under local anaesthetic and he was having brain surgery performed on him and his cognitive functions wobbled during the course of this brain search as they checked it out.

And my heart was in my mouth watching it.

And I'm quite cynical, I've seen a lot of stuff, but I muttered a wow under my breath.

Chris, I mean, what we were saying, it's... a lot of people feel the same way whether you're a big mega super mega indie a broadcaster or even a streamer like we're in flux

So I asked him why it was so important that this cable should be moved.

So I think there's two points I wanted to make, uh, in response to the, uh, outrage I saw in, uh, in response to the story, that I'm somebody who thinks it's way too difficult and frustrating to build things.

There's too many barriers that, uh, stand in the way, and we need to start removing those barriers.

But when it comes to this, firstly, it felt like there was a little bit of snobbishness about the cultural significance of this.

Um, nobody would complain, for example, when the Brontë sisters talked about wind farms be-- or the Brontë Society talked about wind farms being built, um, on the Yorkshire Moors.

Um, but just because this is newer, just because it appeals probably to younger people or to children predominantly, um, or it's far more popular, I think there's a view that it's less culturally significant, and I don't think that is fair or reasonably-- reasonable.

But secondly, somebody like me who believes that our planning system is too bureaucratic and often stands in the way, I still do believe that it's important to protect things that are special.

And so in terms of growth, and I know you've talked a lot about growth, um, uh, as part of the, uh, the labor growth group as well, um, what, what would you like to see when Parliament comes back in September? What would you like to see the Prime Minister do to get growth going?

And others thinking, oh, we need more and more of that.

Yeah, I think you've captured something really helpful there.

I think it's very divisive.

I think there are some who'd say the word feels rooted in something distinctly secular and commercial, which doesn't feel like the Spirit moving in the church.

And others who say, no, this is exactly the kind of thinking that we need.

We may come to that in a moment.

The surprise for many people is to discover the word has existed in the English language for about 500 years.

Tell us the story of St. Brendan.

And you can make a separate argument, can't you? Which is to say that sometimes, and if we'd been having this conversation 30, 40 years ago, your median Labour MP would have thought the way you get growth is a strong central state which can do stuff, and do it quickly.

Uh, uh, well, I think it's a, it's a, it's, it's strong mayoral authorities that can do stuff.

The doing stuff is important.

Um, I believe that it's by creating these authorities that you create the capacity to do stuff.

Um, I wrote a Substack recently, which people are more than welcome to subscribe to.

If they Google my Substack, it's great.

Uh, but I wrote this Substack recently where I touched on some of these points, and my diagnosis and the diagnosis in our report of why the British economy is, has been struggling is effectively the state, uh, has made it too difficult for businesses, for people, for communities, for, uh, people right across the country to do things.

Every Labour MP is nowadays.

Obviously, we're only expecting one name on the ballot, but even with that in mind, Chris, what is the mood like today among Labor MPs? Is there a feeling of sort of revival? Is there a new wave of energy behind you all, or what are the vibes?

I mean, there's, it, it, it just obviously in situations like this, mixed emotions.

Not necessarily between people, but I think each individual MP has mixed emotions.

It is sad to see Keir Starmer go, and even those of us, myself included, um, who called for him to go by the end, uh, are incredibly thankful and always will be for all he did for the party and to get us into government.

But given where we've ended up, I certainly think there is, we are starting to allow ourselves to feel a bit of hope and optimism about the future.

I think a lot of the things Andy's saying about the direction he wants to take the party and the country in are really positive and optimistic.

I think we, the country needs a bit of that at the moment after depressing decade that we have had.

[laughs]

in that space that people wanting their city pads so can you just explain just how deep that particularly when you go the three four million range where you know they're really quite scarce there's just really a lack of them as well right in this pocket

yeah look it's good and then also there's a real distinction though between sort of strata and you know on the ground the often spoken about the refrain of it's really difficult for a downsize that a downsize because the the transfer costs you know the stamp duty etc etc i think that's a very real phenomenon i think one thing i have detected you might find interesting and i really have like particularly in the pots point east you know elizabeth bay area this collective sales stuff that's happening um I attended an all-day urban developer conference two weeks ago.

You'd be across that, and it was kind of interesting.

Speaker after speaker, the refrain was vendors have unrealistic expectations, particularly for duplex sites, which are no flavor of the month with the Todd and LMR.

Ah, yep.

But invariably, they're sort of mums and dads or grandparents that own these things.

They've got no idea of a feasible price for a developer.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Um, so a lot of politics in recent years has been focusing on this idea that we've shifted away from class-based voting to values-based voting, and to a certain extent, that has happened.

The extra layer I'm trying to add onto that is actually, I think what we've moved away from is values as part of it, but to something that considers economic insecurity.

And actually, the voters that Labour won from the Conservatives, yes, they were more socially conservative than the voters Labour already had, and they had to be aware of that, but really it was the economically insecure wing of the Conservative Party.

Broadly, if somebody had voted for Boris Johnson, but they didn't have five hundred pounds in the bank for a rainy day, they were the kind of voter that Labour had the potential to win, and in the end, they won enough of them in those marginal seats to get over the line.

The why really matters there as well, doesn't it?

The problem, the problem that the government has had with backbench MPs is the same that it's had in the polls.

People will always get that there's a difficult decision that they might not always like, but if they see it as being part of a bigger picture, a bigger vision, a bigger journey for the country, they'll be more happy to go along with it, and that's kind of the element that we've been missing, something that joins together all of those different things that the government is doing.

But then you start writing, you write it out and you're like, fuck, like, That, like, that's, like, why did he do that? You know what I'm saying? You start thinking that, why would someone say that? And yet, just as a regular adult, most people just

never review their life the way you do when you write a book.

And then since you did that, you'll understand what I'm going to say right here.

So, and then you start remembering all these things that you never remembered before.

You start remembering all these scenarios, all these events that happened that you totally forgot about because after you write all day or you sit there at night and you're thinking and then something pops in your head.

And you start remembering all these different events that happened in your life.

And yeah, I remember, I remember that house.

Or

What's going wrong? I thought Labour were gonna, you know, sweep to power and start building.

Well, we're doing good things.

So we've already made some changes in order to start building on the, on the Green Belt, on the dirty, ugly brown land that we decided was so valuable you all shouldn't be allowed to build on it.

We're bringing back housing targets for local authorities so they can't just try and find ways of saying no to everything, where we've had the New Towns Task Force report that's come back.

So, and I can list them off, but ultimately this government is doing many good things to get house building numbers up against quite difficult economic headwinds.

Unfortunately, many of those thing, good things we are doing have a bit of a longer payoff, which means hopefully we'll see building numbers rise in the years to come....

but the fact that things are so difficult means that I think we have to go further and faster and be even more bold in our planning reforms and our ambitions for house building.

(laughs)

Now, Chris, I kind of regard you as a bit of a Starmer loyalist, but I imagine you would far rather be here talking about growth than having to talk about leadership campaigns, or lack of them, or whatever.

Yeah.

I, I think that's true.

Um, I mean, nobody, nobody, nobody comes into a job like this expecting it to be easy, or there not to be hard days.

But I think of my not particularly long time in Parliament so far, this has, this has certainly been the toughest.

Um, I mean, I...

Well, I lost my grandmother, um, oh, best part of a couple months ago now, so I spent a lot of time over the last couple years in and out of hospital.

And i- i- if it comes to next May, and we've already had several of your colleagues openly giving him until next May, um, the game could be up by then.

Happy with the performance?

Uh, yes and no. It's weird.

So like, even with the cut being so...

Going so well, you're always a little bit nervous about how your body's going to feel in the fight.

And (laughs) you know, we, uh, we had the fight in Tha...

I was in Thailand, and then I got this fight, so I flew back two days after I got the fight.

And we didn't have time for a practice cut, there was no nothing.

What happened there? What happened? What's your side of the story?

Like what? I mean, just-

... uh, given the size of the problem.

So, I think one of our big diagnoses of the problem that we face, particularly on the e- economy, the reason we've struggled to grow is because Britain has struggled to build, you know.

We haven't been able to build, uh, the number of new homes that Britain needs.

The home of Isambard Kingdom Brunel now apparently can't build a railway line that runs from the south of England to the north, not least because we've wasted money on a £120 million pointless bat tunnel that almost certainly won't save the life of a single bat.

And when Russian tanks rolled into Europe, we were dangerously reliant on foreign oil and gas because we failed to build enough energy infrastructure in recent years and this is because of many reasons, but it's because of a broken regulatory system and a broken planning system that we need to fix.

Now we've done some of those things, I can talk about the nerdy bits, but there is far more that we need to do to ensure that we can build the homes, the energy infrastructure, the new industries of the future, um, on a pace that is necessary to fix our broken economy.

And also targeting Morgan McSweeney as the Chief of Staff as being responsible for a lot of this.

line.

So with Shawn, somebody who's so jab and teep heavy, It kind of worked in his favor to where no matter what, Izzy gets nothing on the center line.

You go back to the corner and you see Izzy said, it was great to see, he said, I can't get my jab going.

Like, yeah, Sean just wouldn't let him establish his jab.

So that was a big, big part of that.

But I don't think Amal Ball fights that way.

That's not the way he's going to fight.

So